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Thanks everyone for coming out! For the next 3 weeks, we’ll be Playing and Rating the games you created.You NEED ratings to get a score at the end. Play and Rate games to help others find your game.We’ll be announcing Ludum Dare 36’s August date alongside the results.

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Played Cage Flight yet? Its a multi-player on-line space-fighter game! You are in a cage, weaving around trying to shoot down the other players; distilled survival of the fittest!

Its the game we wanted to play, so we made it! We are super pleased and proud of it. We didn’t settle on what we would make until the theme was announced; I had hoped we’d fly around a fractal landscape and put a lot of preparation time into learning ray-tracing. In the end I think we shoe-horned the theme Evolution into it acceptably and got the very best game we’ve made to boot.

How would I sum up Cage Flight as a creator? Fun and then tears. Sorry for the hurt and drama in this post:

Making a true 3D game the first time is hard. Making a multi-player game the first time is hard. Making that multi-player game real-time is hard. And making a true 3D on-line multi-player game that works in your web-browser – now that is hard! It has all kinds of challenges and components that we had never tackled before and had not prepared for.

Browser games are the future!

The real down-side to most Ludum Dare entries is that downloading them. Do we really want to be running all these Windows exes? And Unity web-client doesn’t run on Linux.

HTML5&co has really brought new potential to browser games. You have webGL, you have a new proper audio API and you have websockets. A year ago I don’t think you could make a multi-player on-line 3D game in the browser. A half-year ago you might have to use Chrome’s excellent Native Client. And now you can just use the browser! We’ve had very few people saying that they are using Internet Explorer and have no webGL 😉

Quaternion hell

Surprisingly, there isn’t any nice tutorial or anything about how to do 3D flight in a game; they tend to use gluLookAt or glRotatef for rotation and such and they’re all just doing it wrong! I’ll have to make a little cheat-sheet for anyone Googling during the next LD.

Working with web/open/GL and meshes was no challenge, since the team draws from hobby RTS hackers. It was just 1st/3rd-person camera control that I had never tackled before. When moving the camera over an RTS board you tend to have a fixed angle-to-the-horizon and movement is actually 2D. But move to true 3D and the camera has a position and a rotation. The rotation has to be represented by a Quaternion which is just 4 floats; use classic roll, pitch and yaw (called the Euler angles) and you’ll end up with a gimbal lock! You have to be able to determine which direction is forward and which direction is up, and that’s encoded in the quaternion.

I lost about 10 hours debugging my which-way-is-forward code for the players. My initial code was simple and obvious – multiply the inverse of the quaternion by a forward vector scaled by speed. It would work at first but if you spun around more than 180 degrees, it started to fly backwards! And after 10 hours of debugging, I got it working with basically the same code as I’d started with. My problems seem to have stemmed from my library – pyeuclid – not doing what I wanted it to do regards quaternion*vector3 multiplication; moving the forward vector into a 0-rotation quaternion and it all worked. I think my original vector3 code would work in a normal math library, so I think I lost the time more to a bug in the library than me doing it wrong. But the fact was, I know so little geometry – or math in general – that I did not know how to recognise or diagnose where I was going wrong. Hence 10 frustrating hours.

While fighting the quaternions I couldn’t really focus on the actual drawing of the camera. Again, a lot of the Googleable material is out-of-date and uses glRotatef matrices. In the end it was timely intervention by Philip’ (the excellent0ad dev) who very quickly sorted out my camera code while I was going in circles with the server’s quaternion code. I fear we’d have been much further schedule behind without his help.

Multi-player via websockets

The multi-player aspect worked really well (we thought). Its super-simple to set up a websocket server (I used Python’s Tornado) and talk to clients. The very good news is that the websockets can connect to a different server than the pages are served, which has always been a problem with classic AJAX.

So we have a websocket server, and we have all the players sending their key ups and downs to the server. The server stores these in a little table and, N times a second, sees what keys the players are holding down and applies the correct rotations and movement to each player. If the space bar is being held down, it might generate shots. It then serialises the position and rotation of all players and shots and sends it to each player. N times a second each player is receiving the position and rotation of each player and shot. It then draws it.

So, in this design, the apparent frame-rate is actually lock-step with server.

Because websockets can be opened against non-origin servers, we were able to host the game code and artwork on github and only do the actual game-play bandwidth on my hobby VPS. This is a good model you can copy. Remember, though, that github-pages has cache-always headers so people have to clear their browser cache to get new versions of the game. And in Chrome/Safari there doesn’t seem to be a reliable way to do location.reload(true)

We set the frame-rate to 8 fps and had lots of fun weaving around shooting each other! The Glest community stood up and fought! It was play-testing and discussing if up pitches up or down and if the ships moved fast enough or fired enough or the hit spheres were too small and so on. We had testers from North America and they even made videos, attesting to the playable frame-rate they achieved:

Now if you’ve read much in the way of proper game how-tos (I fuzzily remember reading about the Doom/Quake approach and a really great article about the Age of Empires II RTS) you’ll recall that that’s not how you do it! Proper games have the some client-side interpolation between receiving updates from the sever. And its hard to miss all the talk about slerping when you google quaternions.

The flaw was that our initial game-play went so well that we did not identify 8 fps as a problem. In reality we had three problems:

players are unhappy with 8 fps. Their expectations were much higher. They think 8 fps is crap and buggy and call the game unplayable

players don’t always get as good Internet connections to my cheap hobby VPS in Sweden as I do. Even I can get poor connections occasionally. The server times out clients who haven’t sent anything for 3 seconds and clients themselves time out if they haven’t received anything from the server in 2 seconds and the sad truth is that this happens all the time

websockets are TCP-based and TCP has never been a popular protocol for anything with any semblance of low-latency game-playing requirements. But you can’t just chuck UDP into browser games. What we won in simplicity

I could have told you all this. I used to write streaming video servers and clients ffs. But, somehow in my recent focus on servers connected to each other over 100G I forgot it all. As I said, the moment we played our game at 8 fps all thought of client-side prediction went out of my mind. I thought we had a winning game.

And lets face it – client-side prediction is not trivial. There’s a lot of corner cases and it can smooth out tweens between server frames but it can’t really invent whole new frames when it can’t reach the server for a whole half-second. Would it have made the game playable?

“Exasperated wifes and children to unneglect”

Jam entries have three days but we have jobs to go to on Monday, exasperated wifes and children to unneglect. So we were working a weekend schedule. Being in Europe, we didn’t even have quite the same easy weekend as you North American kids. The theme was announced at 2am and we lost a few hours before we got up, breakfasted, kissed the kids goodbye and locked ourselves in our studies.

We skimmed on laser rendering and didn’t actually put in a particle effects engine that I had imagined. We’d played the game and thought it was perfectly fun without them.

Maybe with more time we could have slipped in slerping in the client. We seem to have the tools necessary, now we’ve wrestled with and nailed quaternions. But its a half-fix, and doesn’t address the fundamental, bursty-nature of TCP.

Sound

We did slip in some sound effect for the laser (yeah, I know lasers are silent in real life!) and use cool open-source text-to-speech software to make computer-like voices (as we were un-musical and lacked decent microphones). I imagined 3D sound for the other players, but again that fell out of our time budget.

Early attempts using HTML’s <audio> element to play sounds was a disaster. Just calling play can cause a webGL freeze of half a second or so. It was unplayable.

There is a very new Audio API (I believe a lot of credit goes to pushers at Microsoft for that; thanks!) and Chrome supports it, as does the upcoming version of Firefox. We did get crackily audio for the intro speech on some Chrome browsers on Linux caused, we think, by network activity. But overall it worked really well and had no impact on FPS.

Launch!

The game launched on Sunday. Its a multi-player game so we went over to the Ludum Dare IRC chat-room and extolled people to play. And we had some pretty epic games with 10 or 20 fighters all zooming around the cage and shooting each other. It was such a high to be playing something you’ve made and seeing total strangers also playing it!

The complaints about the FPS were fairly understanding in the IRC chat-room. The calibre of people who hang out there is high and these people, perhaps, understood the challenges to making an on-line multi-player game with any semblance of real-time combat. Or perhaps they complain less to the face. But in the LD entry page comments there were rather fewer well-dones and back-pats.

I sat in the cage Monday and Tuesday evening, to ensure people had someone to play with. And you’d see players popping into existence in the cage, and waggle around a bit as they discover the controls, then move forward a bit, then fire, then … vanish. The vanishing can be split into two classes; those who had done nothing for a second or so so might have timed out on the client. And those who had been making some intricate maneuver and its hard to imagine they got a time-out. Either which way, the game tries to restart and these players didn’t.

The game just isn’t as gripping as we found it.

We could have polished the game much more; added more arcade-style stuff like NPCs to fight, bonuses to collect, hoops to fly though for extra points, power ups etc. But that wasn’t the game we wanted to build; we wanted distilled combat.

Innovative?

Will we be back for the next LD? You bet! We might stop trying to be different, though. Our first-of-its-kind spatial-text-adventure-with-beautiful-graphics fell flat on its face and so too has our attempt at doing real-time multi-player. We’ll end up doing a platform game using tiles in an effort to win compliments, I’m sure 😉

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on Thursday, August 30th, 2012 at 12:08 pm and is filed under LD #24.
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5 Responses to “Cage Flight autopsy”

I wouldn’t worry that much about whether people on here like it or not. Developers don’t really make up any sort of market. Your games will definitely find an audience. I haven’t tried this one yet, but I can tell it is ambitious. I love the graphic adventure you did last time. Take some solice in that many of the best writers and artists in history where in fact unappreciated and penniless in their own lifetime.

I’d have to agree with sfernald. Reading through your post was really enlightening and overall entertaining. I have a great respect for what you and your team did and, though it might not equate to a roaring community of positive comments, I am deeply humbled. If your team can make a voice-synthesizing-3d-multiplayer-browser game… in a weekend? What could possibly be out of reach!?

I will most definitely be giving the game a try next week if the server will have me.
Cheers to you and your team!